I made the mistake the other morning of deciding on the fly to try a particularly daring shortcut on my way to work in Back Bay. I ended up having to wait about twenty minutes at a busy intersection with a broken traffic light; trudge up and down several flights of stairs, bike-on-shoulder; slog through an overgrown, garbage-strewn underpass; and squeeze through a hole in a chain-link fence, before returning to civilization.

It was like falling off the map.

And I'm not even going to mention my escape from the bottomless pothole, the near-rumble with the baby-dyke biker gang, my rescue at the hands of those cute little cannibal midgets only to end up in their stewpot (when they told me they liked me for my bod, I never imagined!), and finally the attack of the rabid squirrels that fortunately (for me—unfortunately for the cannibal midgets) created just the right diversion for my escape.

Suffice it to say I arrived to work in one piece, but with barely enough time to eat my muffin (I'm eating muffins now).

I got some advice on biking to work from house Shazam, Jay*...

...who was hanging out with Batman last night, leaping around in full superhero regalia, and bounced by to tell me maybe I should map out my commute online. It's good cousel, which is partly what you have a house Shazam for, and I considered it, but what's the fun in mapping out your route?

SuperJay has since brought by a bike map, which I'm in the process of examining for clues. The map doesn't tell the whole story, of course. There are at least three very appealing, fairly direct routes on the map which, in reality, are utterly appalling.

I have tried all three. The most obvious for me was Mass Ave all the way from the end of my street over Harvard Bridge to Boylston, but I have tried routes that have taken me over the Longfellow and along the Charles River Dam Bridge past the Museum of Science, too.

The problem is that for long stretches of them they all place me smack in the middle of heavy traffic. Not only automobile traffic, but bus, bicycle and pedestrian traffic, too. This is a little harrowing first thing in the morning. It's a lot of information, and it only takes a second of blanking out—thinking about the day's to-dos, doing a double-take of that cute jogger on the sidewalk—to miss a vital piece of information that could result in accidental dismemberment or death.

And while I appreciate the dedicated bike lanes along many of the main streets of Cambridge, they are still very much in traffic, buses are always coming up behind you and riding your ass, while you're having to keep an eye on parked cars to your right so you don't get doored, with pedestrians like whack-a-moles popping out between them without checking for oncoming traffic (and they don't seem to take bikes too seriously). Not to mention other cyclists, each with his or her own road rules, and everyone with the outsized attitude of the average Masshole.

So the challenge for me is two-fold: to find a route away from cars and buses on the one hand, and one that allows me as much as possible to avoid pedestrians and other cyclists, who are often as dangerous to one another as motorists, on the other.

Oh, and one that doesn't take significantly more time than the T would to get from point A to point B, wherever those points may be.

So map or no map, the search continues. And May being Bicycle Safety Month, I'll let you know if I find any routes that are both safe and sound.

But this latest episode does bring glaringly to light one of my acquired disabilities since moving East from the Midwest: I've found, to my surprise and chagrin, that I'm shortcut-challenged.

I know I'm opening myself to ridicule by admitting it, but back in the idyllic Indiana of my youth everything was on a north-south-east-west grid. Whenever you had a one-way street you could be sure that the next one would be running the opposite direction. The concept was easy to grasp. You didn't ever really need a map. An educated guess would get you wherever you wanted to go.

Growing up I thought the whole world was like that. I was wrong.

Personally I like Boston's narrow winding streets and the willy-nilly layout of its little neighborhoods. But I still haven't developed the sixth sense obviously needed to get from one to another of them.

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*His real name. But actually when I say he's the "house Shazam" I'm thinking not of the comic book character, but of Jackson Bostwick's Captain Marvel in the old Saturday morning TV show, who, when he shouted "Shazam!" was transformed by a bolt of lightning into The World's Mightiest Mortal, much like what happens around the house when anyone calls, "JAY!" By the way, as a child I watched Shazam! religiously, not having the least clue that it was, according to wiki sources, "considered one of the prime examples of camp." I think this may be overstating it a bit, and I may have to sign in to wikipedia and edit the passage to read: "one of the prime examples of Saturday morning cartoon television camp." But honestly, I'm not sure Shazam! was truly camp.  I mean, just because Jackson Bostwick was wicked cute and wore tights?